The emergence of functional, porous materials has had a profound impact on the development of numerous fields within the disciplines of chemistry, physics, and biology. As such, one important focus of synthetic chemistry is to develop new materials with well-defined and increasingly diverse functional pores. Significant research on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and covalent-organic frameworks (COFs) has provided a solid roadmap for the design of new porous materials, ultimately highlighting important design elements, such as self-assembly, that lead to well-defined structure and thus, functionality. Likewise, investigations with materials, such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs), have illustrated the importance of pore shape, size, and composition. CNTs, due to their inherently porous, smooth, it-rich cylindrical channels, have shown remarkable properties, such as mass transport and molecular encapsulation—an increasingly important property of CNTs, which has enabled synthetic access to uniform materials such as graphene nanoribbons as well as various other linear polymeric materials. While CNTs are poised to act as robust tools, drawbacks such as insolubility, inhomogeneity, and ill-defined structure present challenges in their full implementation in various applications.
In nature, non-covalent interactions direct the assembly of relatively simple building blocks into the formation of large, complex assemblies, such as the DNA double helix or the tertiary structure of proteins. Through appropriate molecular design, chemists have leveraged similar interactions to access unique molecular organization, resulting in molecules and materials with enhanced properties or exotic functionality. There exists a need in the art, however, for compounds that can provide materials having reactivity similar to CNTs but that can be made with improved uniformity and purity not achieved with conventional CNT synthesis techniques. There also is a need in the art for compounds that can be easily assembled into uniform assemblies without complicated chemical modifications and/or coupling reactions.